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Lyuudri
Ciernic Empire Tsardom of Kyigorod (formerly) Empire of Arathor (formerly) Taurivy Dróttinnate (formerly) Tirisfalen Dróttinnate (formerly) Highborne Empire (formerly)|Row 6 title = Language:|Row 6 info = Common Govoric Darnassian|Row 7 title = Religion:|Row 7 info = Church of the Holy Light Elunite Paganism (formerly)|Row 8 title = |Row 8 info = |Row 9 title = |Row 9 info = |Row 10 title = |Row 10 info = }} The Lyuudri are a minority ethnic group within Lordaeron. While once having a cultural and political existence distinct from that of other humans in the northern Eastern Kingdoms, the Lyuudrian polity was entirely consumed by the Empire of Arathor during the Troll Wars, and now millennia of assimilation have left few among the Lyuudri who can even recall their ancestry, let alone know anything of the culture. However, remnants of this culture still exist, as do scions of its proud people. Etymology The name "Lyuudri" appears to be an amalgamation of the Lyuudri's archaic native tongue, believed to be a dialect of the Vrykul language, and Darnassian. Presuming the original spelling to be Lyuu'dorei, this would make the people known as the "children of Lyuu." According to the few extant Lyuudri records, "Lyuu" is typically translated as "dragon." Some suggest that the Lyuudri's Vrykul ancestors were descended from the ruling Dragonflayer Clan, though this is uncertain. Physiognomy Lyuudri are often described as having almost elven features compared to humans. They tend to be pale, though many can and do develop tans. Their noses tend to be less prominent than their Arathi cousins, and they usually possess almond-shaped eyes of dark color. There is a preconception that Lyuudri tend to be slimmer in build than Arathi, but there is little truth to it beyond what climate and lifestyle dictate. It would be, for instance, foolish to compare most Lyuudri to Arathi-born nobility, as few Lyuudri can claim the kind of wealth needed to eat in the manner of modern human nobility. OOC Note: This ethnic group is essentially meant to give a background to NPCs and characters of East Asian appearance and naming conventions. East Asian features are typical of this ethnic group. History While historical records of the people who called themselves the Lyuudri are scarce, there is a surprising abundance of records related to the history of their ancestors. It is unclear from which Vrykul tribe the Lyuudri originally came from, and it is distinctly possible they came from a variety of them. The creation of the Lyuudri as a group was not a natural one, but one imposed by an outside source. Like with many Vrykul people groups afflicted with the Curse of Flesh, those who would one day call themselves Lyuudri found many of their children born small and deformed, and while many of their number obeyed King Ymiron's dictate to kill these children, a multitude did not and instead fled with their children into the wilderness. Quel'dorei Thralls The Proto-Lyuudri were not as lucky as some. While many Vrykul managed to carve out small hamlets for themselves amidst the warring empires of the Old World, the Proto-Lyuudri wandered into territory held by the nascent Highborne Empire and soon fell into the hands of a Quel'dorei warlord named Elos Astarion Zin-Shalla. Zin-Shalla was not a significant figure in the Highborne Peerage, holding only a meagre, largely unpopulated fiefdom in southwestern Kalimdor, floating in near-perpetual debt due to the massive tributes and gifts given by Zin-Shalla to Zin-Azshari. He was, however, an ambitious elf, and like many, hopelessly infatuated with Queen Azshara, and he saw in the Proto-Lyuudri an opportunity to greatly enhance his prestige and wealth. Overwhelming the primitive tribe's warriors, he forced the Proto-Lyuudri into bondage and marched them back to his fiefdom, where he put them to work as unskilled laborers, performing agricultural tasks and working as builders and transporters under Kaldorei supervision. With the bulk of the fiefdom's labor handled by the human slaves, the standard of living for Kaldorei under his regime skyrocketed, and many of his lowborn managed to acquire land of their own, some even becoming elevated into the Quel'dorei caste. This, of course, greatly increased Zin-Shalla's own prestige and influence. It was during this early period that the Lyuudri culture began to form. Disgusted with what he saw as a pagan religion, Zin-Shalla forced the Lyuudri to convert to the worship of the Kaldorei moon goddess Elune. While the Lyuudri were not allowed to attend religious services alongside Kaldorei, he ensured that special services for the Kyuudri were held as well, and ultimately the Lyuudri began to appoint their most intelligent women to become their own Elunite priestesses, in the vein of the Sisterhood of Elune. These priestesses were not true members of the Sisterhood, of course, and most had only rudimentary theological education, leading their teachings to become an eclectic mixture of Elunite theology and pagan Vrykul practice, but regardless, they handled the day-to-day of the faith, as the visits of Kaldorei missionaries were few and far between, mostly constrained to important holidays. The elevation of women to the position of priestesses also led to the unique phenomenon among the human tribes of matriarchy. As the Elunite shaman were often the most educated and respected in their respective communities, it was often to them that the Lyuudri turned to for guidance and internal arbitration, as the involvement of Zin-Shalla's retainers in such arbitrations rarely ended well for any involved. Zin-Shalla, for his part, took little notice of the nascent culture he had cultivated; they were compliant, which was all he required. Zin-Shalla was soon invited to court at Zin-Azshari, and he left the day-to-day operation of his fiefdom to his retainers. Legion Invasion The Lyuudri served the House of Zin-Shalla for millennia as the Highborne Empire reached its height. Though he never caught Azshara's golden eye, Zin-Shalla had become an increasingly powerful noble in the Empire, and he became increasingly comfortable with the Lyuudri as an innate part of his power structure. As such, when Azshara began preparations to summon the Burning Legion to Azeroth and many of the lowborn Kaldorei rose in revolt against her rule, Zin-Shalla did not hesitate to press his Lyuudri thralls into service as foot soldiers. In an almost-incomparable display of both arrogance and naivete, Zin-Shalla provided armor and weapons to thousands of Lyuudri, with cast-iron helms bearing the likeness of his face, and used them as the rank-and-file of his fiefdom's levy. Zin-Shalla's retainers, sharing their liegelord's arrogance, delegated most of the day-to-day tasks of organizing the Lyuudri regiments that made up over four-fifths of Zin-Shalla's forces to Lyuudri lieutenants, "specifically chosen" for their loyalty and martial prowess, while they mingled primarily with the Highborne arcanists and shock troops. It seemed none of the Highborne even fathomed the danger of arming an oppressed population under their own leaders and unleashing them upon their own people. For that is what Zin-Shalla did. Reminding the Lyuudri of their thralldom, he stoked their rage and pointed them towards the Kaldorei rebels as the perpetrators of their captivity. He brashly threw away Lyuudri lives by the hundreds, sending them blindly into battles in which they had no tactical information and certainly no tactical advantage. Meanwhile, he personally oversaw battles at the head of his personal Quel'dorei guard, often hundreds of miles from his levy in a vain attempt to impress the Queen at Zin-Azshari with his heroism. All the while, Lyuudri resentment boiled. It was not long into the war that a Lyuudri regiment, led by the Elunite shaman Sakura, turned on its Quel'dorei general, slaying him and his honor guard and seizing the general's entire arsenal of siege weapons. With these weapons in tow, Sakura led the Lyuudri revolt back to Zin-Shalla's feudal capital, besieging the city, then commanded by Elar Sylvenasi Zin-Shalla, Astarion's younger sister. The siege was a stalemate for almost a month, as Sylvenasi managed to convince the Lyuudri garrison that the besieging army was in fact a Kaldorei one, reinforcing the deception with powerful illusion magic. However, Sakura managed to prevent word of the siege from reaching Astarion in Zin-Azshari, and eventually Lyuudri infiltrators breached Sylvenasi's defenses and rallied the Lyuudri defenders to their banner. Within twenty-four hours the city was taken. Sylvenasi, rather than be captured, threw herself from the city's central tower. At this point, Sakura formally declared the Lyuudri's independence from the Highborne Empire. She took on the antiquated Vrykul title of Dróttinn, as well as the Darnassian honorific "Shan," by which she and her descendants would be known. The wiser Quel'dorei fled their armies with their honor guards, stealing or damaging supplies as they departed. The more foolish of Zin-Shalla's generals, however, attempted to steer their own armies back to the capital to quash the insolent revolt, only to find themselves at the mercy of their own Lyuudri lieutenants, many of whom were not merciful. If Zin-Shalla himself ever knew what had transpired in his fiefdom, he never acted upon it, remaining on the front lines. It is unclear exactly why the Lyuudri decided to abandon Zin-Shalla's capital. Perhaps Sakura Shan feared that the Empire would win the war against the Kaldorei Resistance, and Zin-Shalla would return with a Quel'dorei army at his back, or perhaps there were simply too many generations of bad memories built into the cobblestones. Regardless, the Lyuudri had departed Zin-Shalla's domain by the time of the Sundering, gathering as many of their people as they could during their exodus. They passed out of history's sight in the aftermath of the Well of Eternity's implosion, not reemerging for many centuries. The Dróttinnates Over the course of the next millennia (the exact duration and means of this migration are unknown), the Lyuudri relocate northward, and as they reemerge they do so as a multitude of subcultures rather than a singular unified polity. Usually these subcultures were small agricultural communities, though there were also roving warbands of mush'ar present in the world as well; the mush'ar were deadly light cavalry, specializing in the use of Darnassian-style glaives and recurve bows from horseback. Both of these group types, tribes and mush'ar bands, were usually assimilated into another larger polity later in history, or were wiped out as a nuisance. These subcultures rarely bore names of their own, simply considering themselves the Lyuudri, so for the sake of convenience historians have assigned them names based on their region and occupation. So, for instance, there was the Silverpine Mountains Agricultural Tribe, and so on. However, there were a few large Lyuudri polities in existence, called Dróttinnates. Like the smaller tribes, these polities rarely had a formal name affiliated with them, and as such historians have had to assign names; usually these names either correspond with the ruling dynasty or the region the group inhabited. The most notable of these polities was the Tirisfalen Dróttinnate or the Qusintani Dróttinnate of Lordaeron, which grew to dominate western Tirisfal, as well as trade throughout northern Lordaeron, from around 4500 PC to 2900 PC. The longest lived was the Taurivy Dróttinnate or Dorhajin Dróttinnate of Vildskanor, which, while technically a province of the Ciernic Empire beginning around 2100 PC, retained its de facto independence until 1496 PC. As of 39 LC, there are no polities that can legitimately lay claim to the name Dróttinnate, nor any persons that can legitimately lay claim to the title of Dróttinn, despite the derivative title, Drottinnfather, often claimed by the Princes of Kasimirsk. Unfortunately for the Dróttinnates, the Lyuudri were a deeply traditional culture, and with few permanent settlements equipped for research or economic development and fewer allies interested in advancing Lyuudrian society, the Lyuudri began to lag behind nearby tribes in both military technology and doctrine. While powerful warriors, the mush'ar were unsuited to face armored cavalry head-on, and slowly the Dróttinnates were conquered, annexed, or collapsed on their own. Typically, the Lyuudri remained their unique cultures for a time in this situation, but intermarriage and assimilation into their new host cultures slowly ate away at the Lyuudri's cultural identity. Modern Lyuudri At this point in history, to be Lyuudri is to be ethnically, not culturally, Lyuudri, and most Lyuudri identify more readily as Lordaeronian or Ciernic than anything else. One will occasionally find isolated enclaves of Lyuudri that have clung fervently to their cultural identity, usually identified by their unique naming conventions and Darnassian script; however, even these are not surefire signs of cultural adherence, as many Lyuudri, for instance, might still name children Sakura Shan simply out of a vague notion of historical significance. Culture Lyuudri are traditionally a matriarchal culture, with their political leadership often intersecting with their religious leadership, making most Lyuudrian polities technically theocratic. Though the Lyuudri no longer have any states to call their own, most traditional Lyuudrian families have a matriarch at their head, who is honored with the Darnassian honorific "Shan." The Lyuudri traditionally followed a faith that could be best called Elunite Paganism (also called Lyuudri Paganism, by those disinclined to acknowledge this religion as an Elunite faith), the result of their original Vrykul faith mixing with that of the Elunite missionaries sent to convert them. This faith has largely died out due to the influence of the Church of the Holy Light, though it is possible some pockets remain. It was and is common for Lyuudri in the Eastern Kingdoms to take on Arathi names, a practice that would continue through generations and often result in the original Lyuudri names being lost. Lyuudri on Vildskanor have more traditional names, though they often bear Ciernic surnames and patronymics. Trivia * One Lyuudri, Triana Brandt, was known to be so fond of a traditional Lyuudri sweet called sakuramochi, named for the legendary Dróttinn Sakura Shan, that her father would call her Mochi. * The Lyuudri take inspiration from real-world Mongol, Japanese, and Rus-Nordic cultures. Category:Human Clans Category:Houses, Clans and Tribes Category:Highborne Empire Category:Lyuudri